Title: Carve Something OutAuthor: OmnicatSpoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Tensai Okamura & co’s Darker than Black: the Black Contractor anime.Warnings: Rape, murder, Contractors being Contractors.Characters & Relationships: Pai & Hei & bad guy OCsSummary: Hei would do anything to protect his sister and he doesn’t care if anybody else understands that. (That’s a lie. He wishes, more than anything, that Pai herself could to understand.) // 2352 wordsAuthor’s Note: Tian is a Chinese name meaning ‘sky/heaven’, just as Xing means ‘star’. Various other writers have used that as Hei’s birth name before me (I got it from tsuki-llama, who shares a lot of headcanons – including this one – with starrycontractor/major-victory/lolgirl607/darkerthanevanescence, but I also know of FFN’s desy). I love it, okay. I haven’t stopped cackling since I first discovered it. I’m going to use it in everything for the rest of ever. Enjoy!

Carve Something Out

"No, keep the woman sedated," Pai heard them say through the fast-encroaching fog of sleep. "I’ve heard of that one; dangerous power. Try the girl. Look at her, the baby fat’s still on her cheeks. She’ll cave in no time."

"Contractors always cave in no time."

"Well, the kid will cave in less. And the easy victory might even feel earned, for once."

She felt rough hands hoist her up and slap her face. Her head flopped limply to the side. "Hey, wake up."

A harder slap; a sharp tug on her hair; a flare of pain in her ribs. But she couldn’t have made herself react to it anymore even if she’d wanted to.

"Well," was the last thing that registered before the darkness closed in. "That just leaves you, then, doesn’t it?"

Pai awoke to a cold, hard surface beneath her cheek, the uncomfortable feeling of her arms tied behind her back, jeering voices, meanspirited laughter, and a strange, rhythmic slap slap slap, as if of flesh striking flesh. It reminded her of the sounds of hand-to-hand sparring, though the rhythm was different, more even. Almost as if someone were clapping a hand on the fleshy part of an arm over and over again.

Something scraped across the floor, and a wet, strangled sound made itself heard over the mocking and abuse. A fresh peal of laughter rose up.

"Do that again!" someone said.

This time, the sound that emerged was less of a sob and more like a cry, and a pitiful, choked off whimper after that.

"Oooh, he likes that," one of the voices crooned.

And another said: "You’re hitting the spot, keep going!"

"Still haven’t had enough?" asked a third. "You know the girl will just tell us everything she knows the moment she wakes up, right?"

"Fuck you," Hei said, his voice shaking and thick with tears.

Pai opened her eyes just a sliver. Through the cover of her lashes, she studied the room. She and Amber were sprawled on the bare concrete floor in one corner of the room, Amber’s head beside Pai’s, eyes closed and mouth slack. Drugged, Pai remembered. Their captors were clustered around a table at the far side of the room. They had Hei bent over the end of it, his face pressed to the tabletop, his arms bound behind his back, and his black fatigues and underwear down around his ankles. One of his eyes was red and swollen – that was going to bruise – and his nose and mouth were caked with blood. A man was holding Hei’s hips and repeatedly bumping his equally naked crotch into Hei’s butt.

What in the world was that supposed to accomplish?

It took a while for realization to kick in.

Oh, Pai thought belatedly, so that’s what rape looks like.

Weird. From the way the humans had described it to her, she had expected something more obviously violent. Was there something she was missing? But no, a penis was just a penis. It had no shapeshifting abilities beyond getting hard enough to penetrate a pre-existing orifice, no matter what a human man wanted to do with it.

"Boy," the third voice said, as the man bent over Hei grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up against his chest. "You have no idea what a delight it is to have my hands on a real human being for a change."

He snapped his hips into Hei’s backside, and Hei’s spine arched and his mouth and one good eye snapped open wide.

"Yeah, go on, take it," the man pounding into him said with a savage grin. "Take it like a man, a real boy, someone who gives a fuck what happens to him."

Thin, pained noises escaped Hei as he grimaced and scrunched his eyes shut. He tried to shake his head, but the man’s hand tightened in his hair. He bent Hei’s head back further, exposing his throat and forcing his spine into a curve that pushed their hips closer together. The slap slap slap never faltered.

All the hostiles were intently focused on what that man was doing to Hei. Most had discarded their weapons, and none were looking Pai’s way. If Hei could keep them distracted for another couple of minutes, she was fairly sure she could take them by surprise and kill them all.

Moving slowly and silently, Pai closed her eyes, shifted until she could feel her fingertips found the lock-picking tools secured to her wrists beneath her sleeves – these humans were idiots for not searching her more thoroughly; her employers would never send her out with only Hei’s presence to make up for the weakness of her payment – and went to work.

Now that they’d gotten him started, Hei could no longer seem to stop giving voice to his discomfort. The little hurt whimpers turned into sobs, and then the sobbing abruptly turned into "No, no, no!"

Needing to make sure the rape wasn’t turning into something that could maim or kill him, Pai risked opening one eye. But all that had happened was that the rapist had grabbed Hei’s penis.

"Aw, don’t be like that, look how desperately it wanted my attention," he was saying.

He’d live.

After checking that there was still nobody paying attention to her, Pai closed her eyes again and focused on her hands. All she had to do was keep her grip steady, and eventually her tiny file would wear through the plastic cable around her wrists.

"What are they paying you for this loyalty, boy? What could any organization possibly offer a human being to play meat shield to these creatures? They’ll never return the favor, a Contractor would sell you out for an extra ration bar and you know it. Maybe they threw these girls’ bodies into the deal, is that it? Which one, huh? The little one seems like your type, but nobody could resist a woman like greenie there, right? Or maybe they’re both yours. Maybe you get to stick it in any of those freaks you want, every night, and you’re too wet behind the ears to know better. Well, consider this a favor, then."

A slam; the rapist had pressed Hei back down onto the table. With his steadier grip on the back of Hei’s neck, the pumping of his hips sped up.

"A lesson. Human – is – better – boy."

Jerking, Hei moaned in a way unlike anything Pai had heard all this time – like something inside him was breaking. The circle of men around him and the rapist took a collective step back so they could all look under the table, and then they burst out in laughter and applause.

"See?" the rapist said, smug and sure. "Even like this."

Pai grabbed two of the laughing men by the backs of their heads and turned the voltage up high. Before their bodies had good and well started to crumple, she darted around them to grab the third’s arm, zapped him too, and slung his unresisting body at the previous two. The way clear, she leapt at the next two, getting one arm around the neck of the nearest and her other hand on the shoulder of the other, and let her weight carry their convulsing bodies to the floor. The one after that had time to react, but not enough: springing up from her crouch brought Pai straight into his space, his fist flying wide and hitting nothing but a stray lock of hair, and the moment she planted her hand on his chest, he was done for.

That left only Pai, the rapist, and Hei still standing.

The rapist, who was touching Hei in three places. At least one of which might be the death of him if Pai went in for the kill and her current jumped from one to the other. Which was clearly something this man wouldn’t put past her.

Pai straightened, stepped over various pairs of dead men’s legs, and slowly and menacingly advanced on the rapist. Wide-eyed with fear, the man looked from her to Hei to the nearest weapon, a machine gun propped up against a chest by the wall.

He chose the weapon, not the shield.

Just as Pai had thought.

His still erect penis slid from Hei’s body, shiny with some kind of lubricant and streaks of bright red, freshly spilled blood. It bobbed up and down as the rapist turned on his heels. But with his pants bunched around his knees, his first step was also his last; his range of movement smaller than anticipated and his velocity too great for such a small step, his bulk pitched forward while his feet stayed behind. As the rapist crashed to the ground, Pai charged for him.

Her hand landed at the small of his back. He was dead in moments and spent that whole time screaming.

Hei slipped from the table, falling to his knees on the floor with his head bent low and his shoulders hunched as much as cable ties around his wrists would allow.

His knife harness had been discarded along with the rest of his, Pai’s and Amber’s gear on a chair behind the other end of the table. Stepping on each of the felled hostiles in turn and electrocuting them all a second time, this time at greater length, to make sure they were really truly dead and wouldn’t get back up while Pai paid her remuneration again and Hei was injured, she made her way there and back. Using one of Hei’s knives, she cut through his bonds in a single movement.

"How bad are your injuries?" she asked. "Anything that needs immediate attention? Can you walk?"

He didn’t answer. Without looking at her, he struggled to haul himself up on the edge of the table with numb hands. Once he had his feet under him, Pai put a hand on his back and tried to lean around to have a look at his anus. There was a big difference between internal bleeding and a tear in the muscle at the entrance –

Odd. A little beating didn’t usually make him so volatile. Pai figured that whatever the extent of his injuries was, though, it would keep until he calmed down. So she went to check on Amber and cut her arms loose too, instead. Still out of it. Pai would be too, soon; she was starting to feel sleepy.

Hei had pulled up his pants by the time Pai turned back, and was now leaning heavily against the wall and staring at the rapist’s body. He looked disproportionally defeated for someone staring at the corps of his enemy.

"Hei," Pai said, making him jump. "Can you walk?"

No answer. He looked at her beseechingly, but what he was looking for, she had no idea.

"Amber can only carry one of us."

No answer.

"Your blood was on that man’s penis," Pai elaborated. "I saw it when he tried to run. Where did it come from? Internal bleeding is dangerous."

From one blink to the next, tears were rolling down Hei’s cheeks. Pai hadn’t even noticed them well up.

"Why are you crying?"

That just made him cry harder, hiding his face in one hand and the other cushioning his descent as he slid down along the wall.

"Hei?" Pai stepped closer and tried to inspect him for any wounds she may have missed. The exhaustion was making her head spin. "Are you injured? This is important. Answer me."

He wrapped his arms around his head. His shoulders shook.

"Amber will just ask you the same questions when she wakes up. Hei," she repeated, a chest-squeezing urgency welling up from the pit of her gut that she couldn’t put a name to. "Why are you crying? You’ve kept it dry through a lot worse than this. Penises don’t even have any bones or muscles in them, it can’t have hurt that much."

Her body was starting to relax whether she liked it or not. She slid down the wall beside him.

"Why are you crying, Hei? I don’t understand," she said weakly. "I killed him. I killed all of them. You don’t have to be afraid, if that’s why..."

Her head drooped on his shoulder. With what felt like a monumental effort, she reached up and tugged on his shirt.

"Say something," she slurred. "I don’t..."

Suddenly, he pulled Pai to his chest and moved her arms around him.

"Hold tight," he ordered, though his voice was watery and wobbling. "Don’t ask questions, just hold on tight, okay?"

He was holding her to him so hard it hurt. Erratic breaths shook his chest, and through him, her too.

Give your brother a hug, Xing, she could remember her mother whispering to her once, a long, long time ago, when she was still very small and very human. The reason was lost to the fog of time, but she could still picture his tear-stained child’s face, his soft, trembling fists rubbing at his eyes, the little ball he’d curled himself up in. The image seemed very far away, and like it belonged to a different person entirely, but was no less clear for it.

Pai held him with all the strength she had left.

It wasn’t much.

It’s okay, Tian, she thought as her eyes slipped closed, just as she’d told him then. Sister’s here...

Pai woke up. The world was rocking, warm below her and cool at her back, and something tickled the inside of her ear. Hair.

"Hei?" she mumbled.

"Amber, wait a minute," he said, and carefully set Pai on her feet. He held her shoulders until her legs steadied and her eyes focused, and told her tonelessly: "I’m fine. No injuries, and Amber didn’t have to carry either of us."